Hey everyone it's Dylan from The Black Forest Wood Company this week we're going to show you
the process of our team creating this absolutely stunning figured Claro Walnut top with a maple
Burl base that we did a custom black and ash stretcher through so after you guys have watched
this video if you feel we deserved a like, please hit that like button down below and we upload
content like this all the time so if you want to see more builds like this please hit the Subscribe
button the first challenge that we have with this build was even finding a piece of wood that was
going to work for this table base luckily we have some pretty good relationships with some
of the arborists here locally so we were able to reach out to one of our friends and he had
this perfect piece of maple Burl to use for us this stump actually happened to be hollow in the
center as you can kind of see right now which made it unusable for yielding slabs but made it perfect
for our table base, so the first step that we're doing here is trying to remove as much of the
excess material on it as possible so we can get it closer to its final size because we actually need
to let this thing sit and dry for a few months before we can use it so we're just checking our
cut for level right now and checking our straight looks like laser Brad did pretty good there
yeah let's see
it's pretty good that's pretty darn flat okay now we'll flip it upside down and now we can flip the
base over and kind of cut these weird limbs that are coming out from the top of this stump
the other thing that you might kind of notice right now is this piece on its
own obviously is not going to be able to support that table so we have had to sort
of change the design to add a lengthways stretcher into the bottom of this stump
okay so once in a while we've got to make some unusual cuts with doing a project like this here
and in this case, I'm doing a cut that is by having my blade push away from me but it also
resulted in the limb coming back toward me once it released and as you can see by my Lightning
Fast reflexes I elbowed the the branch out of the way you can't be safe enough you always have to
be aware of everything that's going on around you it's impossible to anticipate everything now I'm
not really sure why we went this direction but we opted to not sandblast this piece and we actually
picked off every single piece of bark by hand with the Chisel and then we used our wire wheel
to remove any of the excess debris afterwards so this probably isn't the most efficient way to go
about this if we were to sandblast it first we likely could have saved quite a bit of time but
we had the base here our guys had time to work on it and I think it took them nearly four
days just of solid picking to actually get all of this debris off the outside but now as you can see
here in this clip, it's relatively clean just from picking with a chisel so there really wasn't any
need for us to take it to the sandblasting once we had taken it that far and now we can move on
to actually adding our groove that's going to support that stretcher the first step of that
is to flatten off our top surface with our Avid CNC so we've kind of done a little trick here
we've removed our table that we usually put our slabs on and we're actually going to drop this
base right into the platform of the CNC and what that's going to allow us to do is not have the
surface of this space sticking up 30 inches above our platform where we can't cut it but actually
sitting flush with the rest of the surface so we can get it flat with our CNC machine
then once we have that surface flat it's on to our sliding panel saw to actually
cut this groove so we kind of designed this base around the limitations of our machinery which is
something you should always take into account when you're building furniture. Our saw blade
could only cut to a certain height I think it was about 90 millimetres whereas our original
plan for this base showed 100 Mil stretcher so instead of trying to struggle and figure out a
way to cut that extra 10 millimeters which our saw won't do we adjust the design of our base
shrink that piece down to 90 mils then we don't have to worry we can just use the panel saw for
the entire joinery cut here and after we have finished our cleaning and our cutting of the
joinery now comes time to actually place this stretcher into the leg of the base so this is
a solid ash stretcher that we've created and we we have some half lap joinery going on on either end
to give us width stability so then once we've got our piece actually fitting properly into the stump
then we're going ahead and staining it black so this is probably our most popular finishing option
when it comes to ash it still accentuates sort of that coarse grain that Ash is known for but it
just creates a nice uniform finish on everything it ties in really well into some of these modern
homes that a lot of our pieces go into I know some people complain that you're kind of ruining
the natural beauty of the wood but I think it does a really nice job to compliment these tops
and now it's time to begin work on this slab so we have had a heck of a time even getting this slab
to this point, we struggled with moisture on it all along we had to send it for additional Kiln drying
after it showed up to our shop when it was already supposed to be Kiln dried and finally after about
six months we got it to an acceptable point of moisture below 10 percent where we actually feel
comfortable adding our epoxy into the fills so this client opted for a smoky green resin
kind of just a mixture of green pigment with a bit of gray pigment in there as well and we're
using our deep resin for the larger fills on here and our coat resin for some of the smaller fills
so it just depends on the size of them you know anything under a quarter inch we're using Coat
anything over we're using Deep and then once those are cured it's time to take the slab back over to
the Avid CNC machine and just surface off that top surface so we get it nice and flat something
else that we take is an additional precaution on some of our tables is adding C channels so
generally our rule of thumb for whether we're going to use them or not is if the individual
pieces of wood themselves are wider than three feet so this table is about four feet wide and
it's one single slabs meaning that we want to add C channels to this piece you'll notice on a lot of
our River tables that are wider than three feet we don't add C channels but that's because the
individual pieces of wood themselves are less than three feet meaning they'll be stable once we get
the C channels added it's time to take our piece upstairs and get ready to apply our black forest
Furniture oil so our furniture oil is a hard wax oil a lot like some of the other products that you
guys see on the market like Rubio or osmo now obviously I'm going to be a little bit biased
when I say this but we developed this oil because we weren't getting the results out of some of the
other finishes that we were using with our black forest Furniture oil especially when combined
with our black forest Ceramics we find we get the ultimate protection for an oil finish in terms of
water resistance and abrasions one nice little detail that we like to add as well is a solid
pewter brand to the underside of our tables one thing that I just learned that's kind of
interesting is pewter is the fourth most popular metal that's used for jewelry making
and it actually is considered a fine precious metal once the piece is finished it's time to
actually assemble it onto the base and get everything put together so we've used steel
plates that we've screwed into the top of the base and then we've attached the base to the
table top using threaded inserts well I hope you guys really enjoyed watching the process of this
build this one was a long time in the making it definitely took a lot longer than some of our
other builds like the first challenge was even finding this Burl piece when the client ordered
the table we didn't have this piece so we had to talk to one of the local arborists who had this
chunk of Manitoba Maple then we brought in this figured slab of Clara Walnut and we had to sit
on it for almost a year because it wasn't really drying properly for us so we just had to leave it
and leave it until it did dry out but in the end it all came out really good so again Clara Walnut
top this is kind of a sort of the top section of a maple Burl tree that you can see here and
what you can't really tell from this angle is the whole inside is decayed so it's not it's pretty
heavy but it's not as much as you might think and then we we cut out a notch for this black and dash
Trestle to go all the way through the middle and that's just to give it some stability lengthwise
let us know what you guys think of this design we've got a few more burls that we could make
table bases like this if people like this sort of thing but I appreciate you guys watching all
the way until the end start your comment with Maple Burl and we'll know you made it until
the end and we'll be sure to answer your comment thank you guys again and we'll see you next week